The Paradise Guest House

Finished May 4
The Paradise Guest House by Ellen Sussman

I enjoyed her earlier novel French Lessons, and found some of the same elements in this book.
Jamie is an American working as a guide for an adventure tourism company. She first went to Bali in 2002 to scout out a new tour for the area. She was caught up in the bombing that happened there. As the book begins, it is a year later and Jamie has returned to Bali as a guest of the government to commemorate the bombing and its victims and to assist the country in moving forward. She is being hosted by the family of a local victim. Jamie is having trouble psychologically coming back, but also has a private mission to reconnect with Gabe, the man who assisted her after the bombing.
The second part of the book takes us back to 2002, and has both Jamie and Gabe describing their experiences from the day of the bombing, to a few days later. The two met when trying to rescue others, and   Gabe provided Jamie with a refuge as well as assistance in the aftermath.
The third part continues the story of 2003, with Jamie facing up to her fears, learning more about this country and what it has to offer, and letting herself heal.
This has romance, but because of the circumstances offers a more complex story of a difficult time for this area that relies heavily on tourism. I found it a quick engaging read, that I truly enjoyed.

Two Pints

Finished May 2
Two Pints by Roddy Doyle

This short novel is an ongoing conversation beginning in May 2011 and ending in April 2012 between two male friends in a pub. With commentary on current events in politics, entertainment, sports, and other topics of interest, the two men show humour, wit, and emotion. There are also elements of the absurd, as in the antics and interests of the one man's grandson Damien and his interest in animals. This book had me laughing out loud. Doyle makes his characters come alive as usual, and his comedic timing is spot on.

Bristol House

Finished April 30
Bristol House by Beverly Swerling

This novel is set in London in the present day, but there are also commentaries from two speakers from sixteenth century, one a Carthusian monk and the other a Lombard Jew.
Annie Kendall has come to London to do research. She was hired very suddenly by a Jewish organization to look into the existence of a Jewish man known as The Jew of Holborn who sent ancient Jewish artifacts to various Jewish communities in 1735. This was a time that no one lived openly as Jewish, and the monasteries were under attack by Henry VIII. Annie is a recovering alcoholic, who has much in her past that she isn't happy with. She has snatched at this chance of a research job as it offers an opportunity to take back the academic career she lost hold of several years ago. Her doctoral dissertation had been titled The Effect of Protestant Iconoclasm on Sacred Doorway Decoration in Tudor England, 1537-1559, so the research she has been asked to do is relevant to the time period she is familiar with. Her new employer has set her up with the loan of a third-floor apartment in Bristol House, not far from the British Museum, one of her research locations. The apartment is well-kept, but seems to have something she hadn't bargained for, a ghost. When Annie meets a man, Geoff Harris, that is the spitting image of the ghost, she is amazed, and when she is drawn into Geoff's life, she is sure that there is a connection to her ghost and possibly her research.
A novel involving history, romance, and danger, this is a story you won't want to put down.

The Library of Unrequited Love

Finished April 28
The Library of Unrequited Love by Sophie Divry, translated by Siân Reynolds

This short novel is the first novel for Divry. It takes place on the lower level of the public library in a unnamed provincial town in France. The librarian goes into work one morning to discover a patron who had been locked in overnight. She then says she can't let them out before the library opens as it would alert others to the patron had been in the library after hours, and proceeds to talk about the library, her life, her dreams, and other matters. The text is one long monologue by the librarian, although there are a few points where the patron obviously commented or reacted in some way, but we only get the librarian's words.
There are points where she seems to fall into an unhappy and untrue stereotype of librarian:

"Being a librarian isn't an especially high-level job, I can tell you. Pretty close to being in a factory. I'm a cultural assembly line worker. So what you need to know is, to be a librarian, you have to like the idea of classification, and to be of a docile nature. No initiative, no room for the unexpected; here, everything is in its place, invariably in its place."

But other times she seems to be more progressive. She espouses the views of Eugène Morel (a man I was admittedly ignorant of until now) a Frenchman who had the following view demands of libraries:

"...make it easier to borrow books, have longer opening hours, keep the collections up to date, have comfortable seats, special areas for children, and the underpinnings of the whole thing, the idea, the supreme aim, was that the people should be able to read."

and she feels that:

"...in my job, there's nothing more exciting, to make you feel wanted, than to be able to size up the person in front of you, guess what they're after, find the book they need on the shelves and bring the two together. Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment in a person's life, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life." 

She has dreams of more for herself, both professionally and personally, but lacks the hope or will to make these dreams come true.
This is a gem of a book, and I have to thank Ben McNally for introducing me to it.

Traps

Finished April 27
Traps by MacKenzie Bezos

This novel follows four women, whose lives intersect and shows how each life has fallen into a potential trap at some point, but that each women also has the capacity to extricate herself from that trap and move forward in a more positive way. We have Dana, a young security guard with advanced defense skills and emergency medical skills, who is so focused on safety that she is afraid to take chances with love. We have Jessica, an Oscar-winning actress who has stopped taking jobs and has become afraid to leave her house because of her father, who has repeatedly sold her out to the paparazzi, and then publicly campaigned for her to let him back into her life. There is Vivian, a teen mother of twins, who has gone down the road of prostitution to survive, but will do whatever it takes to protect her children. And there is Lynn, a recovering alcoholic, estranged from her family, who has devoted her life to running a dog shelter on an isolated ranch in Nevada. The choices each woman makes aren't easy, but there interactions with each other give them the strength to make the changes to look forward to the future. A great read.

Who I Kissed

Finished April 27
Who I Kissed by Janet Gurtler

This teen novel tells the story of Samantha, a young swimmer at the top of her game. Her father and her have moved to a new community in the same area to allow her to work with a better coach, and she is hoping for a new start there and a chance to make the nationals. When one of her team members invites her to a party she goes, but something happens there that changes her life forever. She kisses a boy she meets (something she has never done before), who then has an asthma attack and dies. She finds out he is highly allergic to nuts, and she had eaten a peanut butter sandwich before the party. Her feelings of guilt paralyze her and she begins withdrawing into herself. How her situation leads her down other avenues, good and bad, that she wouldn't have otherwise gone down shows the emotions that often affect teens. We also see how Samantha's own history has affected her choices.
The author's own son has both strong nut allergies and asthma and this led her to the idea for this story.

The Monster in the Box

Finished April 26
The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell, read by Nigel Anthony

This is part of the Inspector Wexford mystery series. A man that Wexford hasn't seen in years suddenly reappears in his life. Wexford first encountered him decades earlier when he was a young police officer on his first murder case. The man has reappeared from time to time since then in Wexford's life, often around cases involving strangulation. Wexford has never had any hard facts to tie him to any murders, but has strong feelings around his involvement. He also feels strongly about the man's awareness of Wexford and feels that like Wexford has kept tabs on him, he has also kept tabs on Wexford.
The story is both a mystery and a story of Wexford's life. It is a story about recognizing evil and about letting one's delusions get the better of one. An interesting slowly paced novel that I really enjoyed.

Authentic Letters from Upper Canada

Finished April 21
Authentic Letters from Upper Canada including an Account of Canadian Field Sports by Thomas William Magrath: the whole edited by The Rev. Thomas Radcliff: illustrated by Samuel Lover and Introduced by James John Talman.
[No image as book cover is plain green cloth]
This collection of letters dates from 1832 and 1833, and was originally published in 1833. This edition, with the introduction by Talman was published in 1952.
The letters originate from two families, the Magraths, a family of 8 plus one servant that immigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1827, and the Radcliffes, a party of 13 including servants that immigrated in 1832. Both groups were from the wealthier class of Irish, being able to afford more costs associated with starting out in a new country than most. Two of the twenty letters are from a servant girl in the Radcliffe party, but her name was changed by the editor. The editor was the elder Radcliffe who remained in Ireland. The letters provide detailed information on costs, the conditions of the time, and the activities undertaken by those who came to Upper Canada. They also describe the quick growth taking place at the time in the new communities, with the Radcliffes clearing their own land near the planned settlement of Adelaide in Middlesex County, and it being quite populated less than a year later. With letters from several men, one woman and a servant, this is an interesting snapshot of the times.

Help the Helper

Finished April 21
Help the Helper: building a culture of extreme teamwork by Kevin Pritchard and John Eliot

The authors of this book are Kevin Pritchard, the GM for the Indian Pacers, who has managed other basketball teams and played for five NBA teams, and John Eliot, a university professor and consultant to pro atheletes and athletic coaches, as well as a consultant to a variety of businesses and medical centers. Because of their background a lot of the experiences here, and the examples illustrating those experiences are from the sports world, specifically the basketball world. As I am not a watcher of sports in general or basketball in particular, I found some of this hard to follow.
Despite that, this book was very interesting in how it talked about teamwork. Every chapter did have at least one business example as well, as followup instructions on implementation within the reader's circumstances.
The first chapter explains the Help the Helper philosophy, the second is about creating at atmosphere of unselfishness within your team, the third is about hiring for what is best for the team rather than individual excellence, the fourth about moving away from the carrot and stick method of motivation to a motivation based on spirit, the fifth about managing the energy of the team as opposed to the people individually, the sixth about avoiding distracting communication, the seventh about real toughness involving resiliency and authenticity, the eighth about a 3D approach to measuring: observing, listening, and statistics, not relying on numbers as the driver, and finally, the ninth about being an unleader, a leader who carries the load so the team can do what they are out there to do, who looks for ways to make the team's work the team's work and not a task assigned by the leader.
I liked the idea of looking to the sources of success for your team, finding out what drives the team, and then finding team members who are good at those things, and then working to develop and enhance those skills in all team members. Lots of great ideas here to make teams work as real teams not just a bunch of people who work in the same place.

On Cats

Finished April 21
On Cats by Doris Lessing

This book is a gem, written by the Nobel Prize winning author on the cats in her life, from her childhood in Africa, to her life in England. She gives the reader a true sense of each cat's personality, showing her careful observance of their behaviour and how they interact both with other creatures and with herself and the other people in her life. The cats are the stars here though, and one comes to know and love each cat as its story is told, and I found myself also reflecting on the cats in my own life and their quirks and behaviour.
A wonderful book for anyone who loves cats.